I recently reported on a finding that older adults whose life-space narrowed to their immediate home were significantly more likely to have a faster rate of global cognitive decline or develop mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s.
Now there are some obvious correlates of being house…
There was an alarming article recently in the Guardian newspaper. It said that in the UK, diabetes is now nearly four times as common as all forms of cancer combined. Some 3.6 million people in the UK are thought to have type 2 diabetes (2.8 are diagnosed, but there’s thought to be a large…
In October I reported on a study that found older adults did better than younger adults on a decision-making task that reflected real-world situations more closely than most tasks used in such studies. It was concluded that, while (as previous research has shown) younger adults may do better on…
In a recent news report, I talked about a study of older adults that found that their sense of control over their lives fluctuates significantly over the course of a day, and that this impacts on their cognitive abilities, including reasoning and memory. ‘Sense of control’ — a person’s feeling…
Except in the cases of stroke or traumatic brain injury, loss of cognitive function is not something that happens all at once. Cognitive impairment that comes with age may be thought of as belonging on a continuum, with one end being no cognitive impairment and the other end being dementia, of…
Impaired vision is common in old age and even more so in Alzheimer’s disease, and this results not only from damage in the association areas of the brain but also from problems in lower-level areas. A major factor in whether visual impairment impacts everyday function is contrast sensitivity.…
The Seattle Longitudinal Study of Adult Intelligence has followed a group of more than 5000 people for well over four decades. The program began in 1956 and participants have been tested across a whole gamut of mental and physical abilities at seven year intervals since that date.
The…
It does appear that most component processes of cognition decline with advanced age if the difficulty level is sufficiently high. For example, the following processes have all shown age effects:
Children learn. It’s what they do. And they build themselves over the years from wide-eyed baby to a person that walks and talks and can maybe fix your computer, so it’s no wonder that we have this idea that learning comes so much more easily to them than it does to us. But is it true?
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One thing research seems to show rather consistently is that, for older adults in particular, beliefs about one's own memory performance have little to do with one's actual memory performance¹. People who believe they have a poor memory are usually…